Man of the moment Tom Cruise looks like being the star of two of next year’s biggest potential holiday hits. He’ll be back in action in Mission: Impossible 2, which has now, as a result of production delays, been moved to a summer 2000 berth from its original run-up-to-Christmas ‘99 booking. And he stars in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi drama Minority Report, about a future society in which murderers get arrested before they commit the crime. That was, at one stage, going to open within a few weeks of Mission next summer but has now in turn been moved back to Christmas 2000.

Cruise and Spielberg won’t be the only above-the-title names in Minority Report, though: the other lead looks like being played by Matt Damon, who (unlike Cruise) has worked with Spielberg before, playing the title role in Saving Private Ryan.

The actor - who recently wrapped Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses and is currently in Italy playing the title role in Anthony Minghella’s movie version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley - looks set to play Cruise’s brother in Spielberg’s film. This is a more conflicted role than it sounds, since Cruise is a cop and Damon one of the future murderers he is assigned to arrest.

Cruise’s production company, Cruise/Wagner Productions, meanwhile, is developing a remake of the Roger Corman-produced action flick, Death Race 2000. The original was directed by (of all people) Paul Bartel, and featured a relatively fresh-faced Sylvester Stallone battling Keith Carradine in a cross-country car race in which there were no rules.

The new version will be the work of Brit director Paul Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon), who apparently got to know Corman when the latter distributed Anderson’s debut movie, Shopping, in the US. The remake - which, inevitably, will be called Death Race 3000 - will up the ante by making the race a round-the-world event that starts in Tokyo, and will use computer-generated cars, roads and cities. The drivers, though, will be human. Well, sort of.

Leonardo DiCaprio certainly seems to be working his way through the A-list directors of an earlier generation. He filled his time between two box-office hits (The Beach has yet to open and is unlikely to match Titanic, but is equally unlikely to sink without trace) with a role in Woody Allen’s Celebrity. Now, there is talk of him doing one for Martin Scorsese.

Gangs of New York is a period piece about hoodlums in the Big Apple in the twenties, and has been written by regular Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks. The project is set up at Disney and is expected to roll in November, using sets at Cinecittà in Rome rather than the actual mean streets of Manhattan.

What makes Gangs different from such other Scorsese sorties into the world of organised (and disorganised) crime as Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino is the ethnic background of the hoods in question: the gangsters in Gangs will be Irish, not Italian. Scorsese is expected to complete the big-budget project before starting on his Dean Martin biopic, Dino, at Warner Bros some time early next year.